Baldur's Gate

Baldur's Gate 3 did something the industry had quietly decided was impossible: shipped a genuine Dungeons & Dragons campaign as a video game, with the freedom mostly intact. Larian let players solve encounters in whatever order they liked, including badly.

The systems are the appeal. Almost everything can be shoved, stacked, set on fire or thrown, and the game rarely stops you. Players routinely finish encounters in ways no designer planned, and the game accommodates it rather than punishing it.

The companions are why people finished it three times. Astarion is a vampire with a defence mechanism made entirely of charm, and his arc is the most-discussed piece of writing in the game. Lae'zel arrives certain of everything and spends the campaign discovering her certainty was manufactured.

It also handles romance, betrayal and consequence with more nuance than the genre had managed before, largely by letting characters actually dislike your choices.

This collection covers the party and their weapons. Roll for initiative.